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Why Can’t the Universe Be Cyclic? Part 4: When a Good Idea Meets Bad Data

(This is Part 4 of a series on whether the universe can be cyclic. Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 first.)

So we left off with a beautiful idea. A universe that always existed, bouncing eternally between higher-dimensional sheets, no singularity, no inflation, entropy neatly reset on every cycle. A genuinely good idea.

Good ideas, unfortunately, are not the same thing as right ideas. And ekpyrotic theory has a list of troubles, starting small and ending with a problem it simply cannot talk its way out of.

Let’s begin with the singularity, the very thing ekpyrotic was supposed to abolish. When the two branes collide, the math describing that instant gets extremely uncomfortable. The theory’s defense is essentially a hopeful one: that the exotic machinery of string theory will smooth everything over at the moment of the bounce and keep the dreaded infinities from rearing up. Maybe it does. But “we’re fairly confident the string math will work out” is a promissory note, not a proof, and an awful lot is riding on it.

Next, that elegant trick with dark energy. Remember that the whole cyclic mechanism hinges on dark energy eventually shutting off, so the branes can stop drifting apart and start falling back together. We have not the faintest evidence that dark energy does any such thing. As far as anyone can actually measure, dark energy is a steady, constant feature of the cosmos with no expiration date printed anywhere on the label. Ekpyrotic theory needs it to quit. The universe has made no such promise.

Then there are the branes themselves. String theory, left to its own devices, has a real appetite for branes. Like zombies, once you allow a couple of them onto the stage, it becomes very hard to stop more from shambling in. Many versions of the ekpyrotic scenario end up populated with whole stacks of branes, which drags the theory straight back into the very multiverse swamp that inflation got bogged down in. The thing it was supposed to do better, it ends up doing about the same.

Now, you can hand-wave your way around all of that. Cross your fingers on the singularity, assume dark energy behaves itself, wave off the extra branes. Cosmologists are nothing if not resourceful. But there is one obstacle no amount of clever hand-waving gets you past, and it happens to be the same standard that crowned inflation in the first place: what we can actually observe.

Inflation, recall, makes a very specific prediction about the seeds of cosmic structure. Not just that the seeds exist, but their detailed statistical properties, the precise mix of large and small ripples sprinkled across the early universe. We can’t watch inflation happen directly, but we can read those seeds straight off the cosmic microwave background, the oldest light in existence and the earliest baby picture of the cosmos we will ever get.

Ekpyrotic theory has to play the same game. You cannot call yourself a serious cosmology without making a prediction for those same statistical properties. So ekpyrotic, too, says something concrete about what the microwave background should look like. And the original version of the theory, worked out in the early 2000s, was off. Not a little off. It was “how did you even find my office to tell me this” off, badly out of step with what we observe. Defenders found ways to patch it, the kind of adjustments a less generous person might call hacks, twisting the model until it produced the right sort of fluctuations.

And here is the killer. Even the patched-up version doesn’t survive.

Ekpyrotic theory was originally tuned to match the rough, blurry measurements of the microwave background that were available back in the early 2000s. It was built and refined to fit the data of its day. Then we launched Planck, a spacecraft devoted to mapping that ancient light in exquisite detail, and it handed us measurements vastly sharper than anything we’d had before. Those measurements lined up beautifully with what inflation predicted. They did not line up with ekpyrotic theory. The sharper our picture of the infant universe became, the worse ekpyrotic looked and the better inflation held up.

There are not many escape routes from a result like that. The theory isn’t dead, exactly. But it is marginalized. Few people work on it now. It carries too much baggage: the math is brutal to wrangle, it doesn’t fully or cleanly deliver on its grand promises, and it stumbles on the one observational test that matters most. It is a good idea. But good ideas are not guaranteed to be right ones. That call belongs to nature, not to us, and nature, so far, has voted against it.

So the theory putters along, with a few stubborn researchers poking at it here and there. Maybe because it is still a genuinely fun idea. Maybe because it might yet bear some unexpected fruit down the line. Stranger things have happened in physics.

But for now, the Big Bang and inflation agree with every observation we can throw at them, and the dream of an eternal, cycling, self-renewing cosmos remains exactly that. A dream.

All the evidence points the same hard direction. This one universe, this single shot, is all we get.

So make the best of it.

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Las Vegas family steps in to save Primm, state-line gambling oasis

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A month away from its closure, onetime gambling oasis Primm, Nev., located along the state border with Southern California, has a new lease on life.

The Primm family, owners of the land that includes three casino resorts and other businesses along the 15 Freeway, announced Tuesday a partnership intended to save the struggling state-line strip and hundreds of jobs.

The deal allows Las Vegas-based Terrible’s, owned by the Herbst family and perhaps most famous for a string of gas stations and convenience stores, to operate the properties.

“What we saw with them is the same energy that we had in rebuilding Primm,” said Cory Clemetson, describing the new deal with Terrible’s in an interview with The Times. Clemetson is president of Primm South Real Estate Co. and a grandson of Primm founder Ernie Primm, who made a name for himself in Southern California in the 1930s and ’40s with his Gardena card rooms.

Signage blocks an entrance at Primm Mall on Sunday, July 6, 2025 in Primm, NV.

“Primm has long been one of Nevada’s most recognizable destinations,” said Tim Herbst, president of Terrible’s, in a statement. “This partnership reflects our commitment to preserving that legacy while creating new opportunities for growth, investment, and tourism for decades to come.”

Terrible’s takes over for Affinity Gaming, owned by private equity company Z Capital Partners, in the full-circle world of southern Nevada gaming. In 2010, Herbst Gaming declared bankruptcy and saw Primm taken over by Z Capital Partners.

An email to representatives for Affinity Gaming was not immediately returned.

The process for the return of Terrible’s to Primm kick-started May 5, when Affinity confirmed the closure of Primm Valley Casino Resorts.

Affinity’s subsidiary, Primadonna Co. LLC, sent termination notices to more than 300 employees effective July 4.

The closure was devastating, Clemetson said.

“It felt like a gut punch,” he said. “I mean, you’ve got to be kidding me that they would announce something like that for the Fourth of July. Laying off in excess of 300 Nevadans who are mostly paycheck to paycheck with nowhere to go didn’t sit well with my family.”

Primm Valley was the last of three resorts built between 1977 and 1994 at the site that remained in full operation.

Buffalo Bill’s, the largest of the three resorts, closed 24-7 operations in July 2025, after Whiskey Pete’s, the original casino, shuttered in December 2024.

Affinity Gaming declined multiple requests from The Times to speak about Primm’s struggles.

In a letter presented at a Clark County Board of Commissioners meeting, Erin Barnett, Affinity’s vice president and general counsel, wrote in October 2024 that “traffic at the state line has proved to be heavily weighted towards weekend activity and is insufficient to support three full-time casino properties.”

Scott Butera, Affinity’s chief executive and president, offered a few comments about the closure at the May 21 Nevada Gaming Commission meeting.

“As a tenant with a difficult lease and an expensive property and increased competition every day in California … it just became a very difficult thing,” he said, “and we’ve been losing money for years there.”

Clemetson said that Affinity asked for help over the years, such as potential rent reductions, but that the Primm family was unaware of Affinity’s finances.

As for the future, Clemetson said Terrible’s was in the process of reacquiring a gaming license for Primm, which he hoped would happen in the next three weeks.

He also said it was the goal of the Herbst and Primm families to try to keep all workers who received a termination notice employed.

Clemetson said he was excited about Primm’s future under Terrible’s and chalked up its bankruptcy in 2010 to the Great Recession.

“They suffered a similar fate of many big brands like MGM and Caesar’s,” Clemetson said.

“They’re very well thought of in Nevada and they’re a very successful family who’s done well,” he added.

Speaking of Primm’s chances of regaining its former glory, Clemetson reached back into his own past as a young sports agent for players on the L.A. Galaxy soccer team.

“I can’t tell you how many people told me I was dumb to get involved representing soccer players because soccer would never make it here,” he said. “Now, Major League Soccer has a few franchises over a billion dollars.”

As for Tim Herbst and his family, “we believe Primm’s best days are still ahead.”

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She’s Set to Swim the Entire 900-Mile California Coast — Sharks Permitting

Swimming 900 miles won’t be “the worst way to spend four months,” Catherine Breed says — as long as the great whites, jellyfish and elephant seals leave her alone.

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Space Telescopes Are Now Overwhelmed by Satellite Trails

Unfortunately there’s more bad news to report on the clear skies front. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, reports that 73.3% of images the agency’s new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were contaminated by at least one artificial satellite trail. And it’s only going to get worse from here.

Unfortunately this doesn’t come as a surprise. The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) was designed to map the entire sky in near-infrared light. Meaning it would have long exposure times and cover a very large chunk of the visible sky at any one time. Both of which are a recipe for interruption from orbiting satellites.

Typically this type of light pollution is primarily associated with ground telescopes. But, SPHEREx is an orbital satellite, traveling along an orbit that is 700km above the Earth’s surface. Apparently even that wasn’t enough to escape from the light trails. On average there were 2.18 trails per exposure, most of which are concentrated in an “X” pattern that mimics the orbital paths of the satellite megaconstellations.

Fraser discusses the potential limit to how many satellites we can launch.

There appears to be no easy way to handle this interruption, either. SPHEREx uses an automated “sample up-the-ramp” algorithm to protect itself from stray cosmic rays. When a sudden energy blast from one of those rays hits a pixel, the system halts data collection on that pixel to prevent saturation. But commercial satellites are now so bright that they are triggering this system without the help of any stray cosmic rays.

The resultant images have what the authors describe as “railroad” tracks, where the blinding center of the trail is scrubbed out but parallel lines running alongside it are permanently etched into the science imagery. As a result, the images lose the photometric data of anything hidden beneath the rails.

As if that news wasn’t bad enough, SPHEREx isn’t the only one suffering from this fate. A few years ago another team led by Sandor Kruk published a study that found the fraction of Hubble images crossed by satellites rose from 2.8% in the early 2000s to 5.9% in 2021. Admittedly Hubble doesn’t take as wide of shots as SPHEREx, but the fact that one of the most venerable space telescopes still operating is suffering from the same problem is not a good sign.

Fraser discusses the advantages of using ultra-black paint – though that won’t solve all of the contamination issues.

Satellite designers have tried various efforts to mitigate this problem, including dark coatings or specialized visors to reduce their optical brightness. But newer systems, such as direct-to-cell towers or AI data centers, are up to four times larger than existing satellites, eliminating any potential benefit of darker coatings and cementing them as some of the brightest objects in the sky.

And it’s only going to get worse from here. Recent FCC filings have been made to approve up to 2 million satellites in Low Earth Orbit, as compared to the 20,000 or so currently in orbit. If those are approved and launched, simulations from the new paper forecast that 100% of SPHEREx’s images would be polluted by a satellite trail, a significant increase from the current ~73% contamination rate. And the average image would have 189 trails in it.

Needless to say, that is catastrophic for observational platforms below or in the orbital plane where those satellite megaconstellations exist. And various groups have been ringing the alarm bell about this potential catastrophe for years at this point. Unfortunately, there seemingly hasn’t been any movement on coming up with an international agreement to do anything about it. Hopefully this paper will serve as another forcing function to finally do so.

Learn More:

A.S. Borlaff et al – SPHEREx confirms predictions for artificial satellite trail pollution in Low Earth Orbit

UT – Satellites Have Brightened the Skies by About 10% Across the Entire Planet

UT – Satellite Constellations Are Too Bright, Threatening Astronomy and Our Night Sky

UT – Are We About to Permanently Scar the Night Sky With One Million AI Satellite and 50,000 Space Mirrors?